


Acrobat

by unreconstructedfangirl



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Bittersweet Ending, Friendship/Love, His Last Vow Spoilers, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-23
Updated: 2014-05-23
Packaged: 2018-01-26 03:22:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1672838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unreconstructedfangirl/pseuds/unreconstructedfangirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock feels like his heart is an acrobat, twisting itself into contorted, impossible shapes. He feels stretched and twisted to the limit of his endurance. He knows John has things locked inside and twisting, too. Their mutual silence steadies them both, and the ballast of what they won’t say binds them to an equilibrium of weighted stasis. </p><p>Post HLV angst fest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Acrobat

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first fiction of any kind that I've written in a long, long time, so I'm so pretty nervous about sharing it, and I would be so happy to have any comments you care to leave. Also, I am a famously bad typist, so please feel free to leave corrections as well.
> 
> I also need to thank my very helpful and ridiculously kind betas: Interrosand gave me some much needed early encouragement for which I am very grateful, and mild-lunacy had the incredible patience and perseverance to hold my feet to the fire in all the best ways. Without her, this story would not be what it is, so if it's good, it owes her a deep debt, but if it's not, it's all my own fault, because sometimes I refused to listen to her.
> 
> This story was in part inspired by the lyrics to U2's beautiful song "Acrobat", and was written for redscudery's Achtung Baby! Sherlock Songfic Writing Challenge. So, with thanks to redscudery, too! :-)

**+++**

_“Give my love to Mary. Tell her she’s safe now.”_

**+++**

In the maelstrom that follows Magnussen’s murder, Sherlock turns to face the light and noise and assumes the position, his heart pounding in time with the blades of the helicopter that’s blinding him. He knows the red dots of the laser sights are crawling over his skin, and his knees hurt. After a fraught moment staring into the cacophony of light and noise, he closes his eyes with the kind of infinite gentleness that’s only possible in the midst of the most appalling chaos. John is behind him, and Sherlock can feel his panic and confusion—his laboured breathing, his pounding heart—as if they were inside him, as if they were his own lungs and his own heart.

John behind him, Mycroft in the helicopter.

_Nothing to fear._

Sherlock wills himself still and surrenders, retreating into the isolation chamber of his own mind. He allows the world outside his skin to fade and muffle, and allows himself to be the still point around which everything else is rushing. It’s a stillness that doesn’t come naturally to Sherlock, but really, such a lot of things have happened recently, and so many of them don’t come naturally to him. Maybe what comes naturally to him is changing.

He breathes. He focuses his attention on his breath and observes his own thoughts, aware now of the intractable fatigue that’s creeping like a fog through his consciousness. He’s just so tired—so deeply tired of pretending to be indestructible and omniscient when he’s really just feeling flayed open—aching, heartbroken, and as fallible as any man. For months now he’s been struggling against a riptide of irrepressible emotion, and now he’s finally at sea, drifting further and further into the deep. In all the flash and noise, he lets himself float away into profound silence, and it’s a relief, rare and precious.

It’s self-defense.

When they take him, his eyes are open again and his face is impassive, streaked with the silent tears he’s only just aware he’s been crying. His left shoulder is badly wrenched into the handcuffs, but he barely feels it, and he doesn’t resist.

From the helicopter, Sherlock looks back at Appledore and sees John standing on the stairs, shielding his eyes with his hand, his head turning to follow as they lift off and away.

**+++**

The holding cell is bare concrete and stainless steel, lit by buzzing fluorescents set in the ceiling. Sherlock has been aware of the buzz for some time, but he’s disorientingly uncertain of how long he’s been there. Consciousness is fitful, which isn’t logical, because he knows he’s uninjured. It’s as if he simply can’t pull himself back into the light from the murky depths of his mind’s silent rooms where none of this has happened, and where everything has just fallen back into place the way it should have done when he’d returned from the dead to give John his miracle.

_Should have?_

No.

John forgave him, but Sherlock knows he can’t forget. He’s never deserved John. It wasn’t a miracle, it was a cheap trick, and he underestimated the toll.  

Sherlock struggles against the torpor, and when he lets them flood back, the last few days and hours play over and over in his mind in a curiously smooth loop, as if there _is_ nothing else.

_Mary. Magnussen._

Appledore.

_You underestimate me, Mr. Holmes._

He should have known. He’d been wrong about Magnussen’s dead eyes, too. Was it really so impossible that someone else was as good at being a walking mnemonic device as he is? Sherlock knows now that he has been so driven by emotion and so helplessly reactive, that he’s finally made the perfect storm of fatal errors that will cost him everything. Such a cliché. Magnussen is dead, Mycroft’s hands are tied, and Sherlock still has nothing but his suspicions about Mary.

Suspicions are not enough to break John’s heart again, nor are they enough to heal it.

So many plans he’d thought were carefully laid—dashed. Now only gaol or exile await. If only he’d been as good at being dead inside. If he had been, none of this would have happened.

Sentiment.

He squeezes his eyes closed and drifts.

**+++**

_221B Baker Street. Home._

_Sherlock’s been back from hospital for a week following the night when his heart stopped for the second time.  Not only is Sherlock back, but John is there too, and he’s smaller, graver and tidier than ever._

_John haunts Baker Street like a shade, diminished and silent. He goes about small domestic tasks and looks after Sherlock’s convalescence in a spare, efficient kind of way. His lovely, lined face is a carefully composed mask of studied calm, while his eyes burn and flash, heavy and dark; Cumulonimbus Congestus, all convection and atmospheric instability, filling the flat with an eerie calm, prickling and hot, even when it’s cool. The parallel vertical creases above the bridge of John’s nose seem to have become permanent and his thin lips are compressed into a rueful straight line only when they're not twisting themselves into bitter, joyless smiles. He rarely speaks, and when he does, it’s only to say stabbing, terrible things like “Tea?” in a voice that only masquerades as normal._

_Sherlock can’t stand it._

_He watches John over his tented fingers, his own mask pulled down just as tight, looking as coolly composed as ever, but he’s horribly tethered to John’s misery. He’s been unable to think about anything but John while John storms in his quietly all-pervasive way, and his heart feels like a stone in his chest. He doesn’t know if that’s because it aches where Mary shot him, or if it’s because John’s heart does. This has been going on since Sherlock returned from hospital. After a week of it, he’s unable to find the rhythm of his own thoughts. He barely recognises himself._

_Mycroft was right. Caring is not an advantage._

**+++**

Sherlock’s eyes flicker open.

No. Mycroft was wrong. What’s more, Mycroft still thinks he has utility. Clearly not. Not now.

It’s cold in his concrete box. He shivers and curls in on himself on the bare mattress, burying his face in the dirty ticking and the stale smell of old sweat. The truth is, this disturbance began before those heavy days in Baker Street. He’s been off his game since he came back from the dead. Since the moment he saw the cavernous depths of his own human error in John’s eyes.

And since he met Mary.

Since then, it’s been one fatal mistake after another—too many deductions or not enough deductions—all of it culminating in this flood of suffocating emotion, buffeting him without respite. He wants what he can’t have, and now he’s allowed his own inescapable chemical defect to blind and shackle him.

It’s over, and any utility he ever had is spent.

“Goodbye, John,” he whispers into the silence.

_Melodrama. Self-pity. Pathetic. Disgusting._

He rubs his cheek into the damp spot in the mattress and wonders idly if the person who was held here before him cried, too.

**+++**

“How’s the new chapter working out for you, Sherlock? The not getting involved?”

Mycroft is hatefully prim and self-contained. Tweed, brushed cotton and silk twill, buttoned up just so. He’s out of place in the squalid minimalism of the cell, but looking for all the world at his perfect ease. There’s the slightest hint of a gloating sneer around his mouth, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. His eyes are not sneering at all.

Sherlock can’t look at him.

Sherlock had no choice and he says so, his voice cracking. Ridiculous. He turns away as the look in Mycroft’s eyes softens further and veers too close to understanding and pity (and gratitude?) for him to bear.

“I didn’t do it for you,” Sherlock says dully, to the grey wall.

“Oh, I know _that_ , little brother,” Mycroft returns softly, as one of his nameless minions comes in behind him with Sherlock’s clothes, cleaned and pressed.

“Get dressed.”

“Mycroft?”

“Yes?” Rustle of hands in pockets.

“Get me some morphine.”

Mycroft releases a long, slow breath, but all he says is “Get dressed, Sherlock. We need to talk.”

No, then.

Sherlock recalculates.

“I want John, Mycroft. John first.”

Sherlock  turns and squares his shoulders. Manages to lift his chin to look Mycroft in the eye and stop himself from quavering. His face says that he will brook no argument, but he feels like he’s just written a cheque he can’t cash.

Mycroft’s chin tucks down, as he raises a wry eyebrow and ever so slightly grimaces. He doesn’t reply, but Sherlock sees his answer in the way his eyes look suddenly glassier, and turns back to face the wall again, relieved.

Mycroft leaves without a word.

Sherlock gets dressed.

**+++**

Sherlock doesn’t know how much time has passed, but his certainty that Mycroft will comply is eroding by the hour, and the doubt in his mind is compulsive, like an itch that he can’t stop scratching until it’s raw and bleeding. Worse, he finds that Mycroft’s compliance isn’t the greatest of his anxieties, John’s is.

John will come. He has to come. Won’t he?

Sherlock knows what he owes John. He knows that John has been through too much. He rolls over on his bare bunk to face the polished concrete wall.

Maybe it’s best if John doesn’t come.

**+++**

_Sherlock sits in his chair, watching John move about the kitchen, taking up space and air in a way that should be impossible for so small a man. Sherlock is suffocating. John’s been living at 221B since he came came home, and Sherlock knows he hasn’t spoken to Mary._

_Won’t speak to her._

_John’s pain, anger and uncertainty have been droning in Sherlock’s ears for weeks, like it’s his own personal brand of tinnitus. It pervades every moment, keeps him from sleeping, wakes him up when he does manage to get a few moments of blessed oblivion, haunts his dreams, and blocks any other mental process._

_He feels as if he is, quite literally, losing his mind._

_“John,” he says abruptly. Loudly._

_John stops in the middle of his washing up and raises his head in answer. He doesn’t turn, and he says nothing._

_“John.”_

_“Sherlock?” Annoyed. John turns at the waist to look back at him._

_“We have a case.”_

_“A case. Yeah. Right. Ok.”_

_Sherlock hates the way John’s slumped shoulders don’t straighten anymore when Sherlock says “case”. Hates the way John acquiesces, as if he’s not really there. He’s just going through the motions of being John Watson. His John Watson. It’s excruciating._

_“Your case.”_

_John turns and looks Sherlock in the eye at last, his face simultaneously blank and anything but blank. Seethingly blank._

_“Mary’s case.” Sherlock adds._

_At this, John smiles. He’s so very angry. He looks away, and then back up at Sherlock—eyebrows raised, lips pressed together in a thin bow—and away again, this time at his shoes. He’s got the sponge in his hand and he turns to put it back in the dishwater. He dries his hands on a crumpled tea towel, goes to the hallway, puts on his coat, and leaves without a backward glance. Without a word. Sherlock hears the street door close, a controlled “snick”, curt and final._

_“My case,” Sherlock says to no one, letting a long, steadying breath leave his lungs before pulling in a short, sharp one through his nose._

_He stands, brushes his suit smooth, buttons the top button of his jacket, and climbs the stairs to John’s room. It’s time. He knows perfectly well that John hasn’t read it—won’t read it—and he also knows that John hid it in his old army trunk, amongst his cast off uniforms and dusty medals. He wasn’t meant to read it. The flash drive was for Sherlock._

_This is a case, and Sherlock needs data._

**+++**

Shame there wasn’t any.

Mycroft had had more, but nothing helpful. Hadn’t had, or wouldn’t tell Sherlock enough, Sherlock isn’t sure. Mycroft confounds him. Mycroft told him about Mary’s work for the CIA, how she’d gone freelance. He’d known about some of her kills—known she was a player. Bloody Mycroft. He gave Sherlock nothing that could relax his fears. Nothing they didn’t already know.

In the end, Sherlock had decided that it didn’t matter what Mary was; her child—John’s child—had to be protected. Mary had to be protected. Protecting Mary was protecting John.

And then, there was John’s love. Sherlock knows better than anyone what it means to have John’s love. He knows John’s depth of loyalty and the superhuman power of his forgiveness. Sherlock knows John’s heart.

He told John what he needed to tell him to make him take her back. Sherlock’s suspicions are damning, but they are no more than suspicions. There’s no proof. He told John what he had to so that he would make Mary feel safe, make her feel like she’d won. Enough to keep John’s child safe, and most of all, because Sherlock is selfish, to keep John safe.

**+++**

_When John returns hours later, Sherlock is lying at full length on the sofa, praying hands pressed into his philtrum and lips, lost in thought. He follows John with his eyes as John crosses the room to sit down at the desk. John’s hair is ruffled and his cheeks are flushed—he’s been outside for a long time and the cold has drawn the blood to the surface. He looks vivid and alive, and for the first time in what feels like forever, he looks at Sherlock without rancour._

_“You’re…” John drops his head, shakes it, looks back up, “...yeah. Sherlock. You’re right. We do have a case. I’m sorry, I…just...” he stops. Steadies his voice. “Right. No time like the present,” he finishes ruefully, looking up to meet Sherlock’s eyes._

_Sherlock sits up, and returns John’s gaze. Nods. “I know this is hard for you, John.”_

_Sherlock understands why, too, but he is limiting himself to the understanding of the denotation of words like loss, betrayal and heartbreak, which Sherlock has, once again and by sheer force of will, wrestled apart from their visceral meanings and locked safely away in separate rooms. The case is what matters now._

_“Where do we start?” John asks him._

_“Magnussen,” Sherlock replies. “We get whatever Magnussen has on her.”_

_John nods, grimly amenable, but that’s when his eyes drop to the laptop in front of him, and he sees it. His face suddenly reminds Sherlock of one of those impossibly bright days in early spring when the the facades of the buildings are shining in the sunlight as the sky turns an alarmingly dark gunmetal grey, just before the clouds burst._

_“What is this?” John grits out, anger flaring in his face “Sherlock? What?”_

_“Mary’s flash drive.”_

_John squeezes his eyes closed, lowers his head and Sherlock can see his face tighten. It’s a surprise, then, when his voice comes out shaky and very nearly tearful._

_“You utter…”_

_“John, someone had to read it. Someone had to. Mary knew you never would. I had to.”_

_John stands and turns his back to Sherlock, stiff and upright. Sherlock stands too, wishes he could touch him. Wishes he believed touch could change anything. It feels like an eternity before John breathes in sharply and drops his head._

_“Right. What does it say, then?” His voice is flat, toneless. He’s afraid._

_“Nothing.”_

_He turns. “Nothing? Nothing! Sherlock, that’s not…”_

_“Funny? No, I agree. I never said it was, John.” Sherlock moves closer. “You seem to imagine that I find quite a lot funny that I do not. The flash drive was empty. It was a gamble. Perhaps a test. Mary knew you wouldn’t read it. She gambled that the gesture—offering it—would be sufficient. You packed it away with your army uniforms and tried to forget it. Was it enough, John?”_

_John is breathing hard now. His eyes have lost their watery heaviness, and now they are crackling._

_“I went to Mycroft. Mycroft knew. He’s known all along.” Sherlock continues._

_At this, John smiles tightly, and his eyes intensify. There’s a question in them.  Sherlock answers it._

_“No, John, I did not know. I…” he pauses, searching for true words. “I wanted to like Mary. For you, John. I ignored…” Sherlock stops. Looks down, and then back up to meet John’s eyes, “I—I did like her.” Sherlock doesn’t make room in his mind for what he sees in John’s face now._

_He presses on._

_“He knows she was a C.I.A. asset—a few photographs of her with known officers,” Sherlock pulls them out of a file on the desk, passes them to John, who looks at them numbly, “and a slate of professional wet jobs, organised crime hits, mostly. Clean. Nothing you’d be unable to forgive. She did a job. She was under orders. A patriot. The people she killed for money were not nice people. You can understand that, can’t you John?”_

_“Sherl—”_

_“I’m not finished. Mycroft didn’t know, or wouldn’t tell me anything more. His latest information of any interest was three to four years old. What’s she been doing since then? Any guesses?”_

_“Working as a nurse?” John says hopelessly, “falling in love with me?”_

_“The bonfire, John. The skip code. The wedding telegram from CAM? Mary’s been playing us both. Why? What was she doing in Magnussen’s office the same night we broke in? Coincidence? Please. Why did Janine let us up if she knew Magnussen was there? Was Mary there to get what he has on her? Or, was there something else. Was she on a job?”_

_“Of all the clinics in London, why was she working in mine? Yeah, I get it. What has she been doing with me from the start.” John says, falling back into his armchair, defeated. “God damn it, Sherlock. You read it. God damn you.”_

_Sherlock shakes his head, runs his hands through his unruly hair._

_“John. Think. Stop this, and think. She’s working for someone. The question is, who? You like danger, John. You were an easy mark. She lied to you, and she shot me. I offered her my help, and she shot me. Why?” He pauses, looks hard at John. “Mary is dangerous.” He finishes._

_Then, almost an afterthought: “But, we all are, aren’t we.”_

_“I thought she loved me,” John says, brokenly._

_Does John still want it to be true? The deduction, sudden and undeniable, hits Sherlock like a blow to the solar plexus, and he realises belatedly that what’s lancing through him so painfully is empathy, brutal and merciless. That desperate desire for an idealised past and a specific love is not beyond his ken. Not at all. For a moment, he can’t breathe. Could it really be true that John still wants her? That he wants to forgive and forget?_

_Of course it could. Of course John does. Sherlock remembers their sweetly clumsy wedding waltz. The way they matched each other, both small and fair in their fine clothes. He remembers the  baby—John’s pleased face and Mary’s smile, and the way her eyes crinkled. Sherlock loved her smile. He remembers the feeling of fading away he had then. He remembers his cab ride home, nighttime London flashing past. He remembers the silence in Baker Street._

_John does want that. He chose Mary._

_All at once, Sherlock can’t think at all. The compulsion to tell John everything—everything he suspects and everything he feels wells up in him, swift and surging. He hears it all—his own voice in his ears—as if it’s spilling heedlessly from his lips. Mary was put in your path for a reason, John, she’s with you to get to me somehow, and I love you. I love you. I love you. He imagines himself falling to his knees, his head in John’s lap. He sees John relenting, his face glowing affectionately as he drops a heavy hand to smooth Sherlock’s riotous hair. His riotous mind. He feels John pulling him up, his hands framing Sherlock’s skull. Holding it together. Nothing but John’s eyes. His mouth. His tongue, soft and wet._

_But, he can’t. He can’t do that. He wants, so badly.  He understands._

_Sherlock turns away. Lets it rush through him and subside._

_“Sherlock?” John’s come closer. Sherlock feels him hovering, his nearness a question. Sherlock doesn’t know what it is, but he attempts an answer._

_“Perhaps she does,” he offers, trying to keep the defeat out of his voice. “I don’t know. Don’t you see? I don’t KNOW anything.” Sherlock pauses and says it: “You have to go back to her, John. There’s no other way. We need to keep her close.” He says it to the battered smiley on the wallpaper. He can’t bring himself to look at John._

_Mary is a liar and a killer, but Sherlock has lied, and he knows he would kill, too, if he had to.  Insofar as a stone cold liar and killer is able, perhaps she does love John. If she does, she loves him possessively and fiercely, and she will keep him safe, as long as the feeling lasts. Sherlock knows she’s capable. Maybe she does love him. Sherlock does._

_Could John forgive her? Truly take her back? The idea is a gathering storm in his mind, and Sherlock finds that while he can’t give Mary a second chance (it was hard enough let John go once), he knows he can’t stop John from wanting to._

_And, Sherlock got one, didn’t he? A second chance?_

_Sherlock’s desire to have John back in Baker Street in his tatty dressing gown, reading the papers is a deep and persistent ache. John, with him, chasing through back alleys and over the rooftops with London laid out before them like a patient on a table feels like the only way Sherlock can survive. He needs John to marvel at him; tell him he’s extraordinary. The only thing he can imagine truly wanting is the unimagined joy of being brought up short by learning new, impossibly thrilling things about John, and he burns to touch John’s skin and kiss him and taste milky assam on John’s tongue._

_All he wants is all of John, all the time. But, John is just staring at him now, incredulous. Furious._

_“We need?” John breathes, his eyes flashing, full of charge._

_What Sherlock wants is immaterial, as it should be. He knows John must go back to her. Not only for them, or for the case, but because John is not ready to let her go. Because he loves her._

_The very idea fills Sherlock with a desperate, burning horror._

**+++**

The silence of Sherlock’s cell isn’t breached until the next morning, when John enters, carrying a stainless steel tray. Breakfast. Dry toast, cold scrambled eggs, tepid, black tea. Disgusting, but Sherlock clambers gracelessly to his feet and takes it anyway. He sits on the edge of his bunk. Doesn’t look at John.

John backs away and leans against the opposite wall, his arms crossed over his chest. His wool and cotton clad presence is comforting and warm, familiar but interdicted. He waits.

Sherlock stares into his eggs. Breathes. Looks through inky curls at John’s solid, homely shoes. Closes his eyes. Breathes. Puts the tray down on the bunk next to him, grips the edges of the mattress and raises his eyes to John’s.

“John,” he attempts. No sound, just breath.

John flinches. Looks away. His throat works convulsively, mouth twisting.

“John.” Voice this time. Unsteady, but more than just air.

John looks up at him, tears falling silently from his dark eyes. _Cumulonimbus Praecipitatio_. Something has changed between them, but Sherlock has too little data and is too compromised by sentiment to deduce what it is. He rises to his feet as John’s hands fall slack at his sides.

“Sher—” John starts, choking. He steadies himself, shakes his head as if to clear it and fixes Sherlock with stormy eyes, his right hand clenching, unclenching.

“Sherlock?” He manages. It’s a question. John doesn’t look like he expects an answer.

Sherlock stops resisting his impulses. He stands and closes the distance between them and pulls John to him. Pulls him close. John has hugged him, Sherlock remembers, and now Sherlock feels ashamed that he has never returned the gesture. He can do this. His hand comes up and holds John’s head against his shoulder, his fingers threading through John’s sandy hair. John allows it, but doesn’t respond in kind. He turns his face into Sherlock’s chest, struggling to control his emotion. Failing.

Sherlock doesn’t know what to do. He wants to stroke John’s cheek, and comfort him—turn John’s face up and kiss him, and he can’t. He wants to tell John all of his suspicions and all of the truth, and he can’t. He wants to be comforted and loved, but John can’t. He swallows back his ridiculous urge to sob, and they stand like that for a period of time Sherlock doesn’t want to reckon. John’s clean, soapy smell and his warmth fill Sherlock’s head, and the texture of his hair is softer than Sherlock ever imagined it could be.

But, all good things.

He lets John go when he feels the tightness drain from his muscles and the worst of it is over, and goes back to sit heavily on his bunk. John scrubs a hand over his face. After a moment, he follows and sits next to Sherlock, his head in his hands. For a moment, they just exist, side by side. Then, John sits up, inhales deeply and lays his hand over Sherlock’s, and says, very gently:

“Sherlock, I know what you did. I think I understand why you did it.”

His voice is warm, intimate. He’s looking at Sherlock’s profile now, his eyes still wet, but his face is open and questing. He runs his palm over Sherlock’s white knuckles. Sherlock’s eyelids flicker closed of their own accord and he feels like he’s capsizing in his silenced mind. He doesn’t reply, but it’s only because he’s under water.

“What’s going to happen to you?”

Sherlock cannot avoid the awareness that something in his chest is squeezing painfully. He’s holding his breath, in danger of drowning.

“I don’t know,” he says, surfacing. “Mycroft will tell me.”

**+++**

That afternoon, Mycroft does tell him: it’s to be exile.

“Don’t look like that, Sherlock,” Mycroft chides, as if showing remarkable forbearance to a needy child, “the alternatives were much worse. This way we have the ghost of a chance.” He looks down his nose condescendingly. “Chin up, little brother.”

Despite Mycroft’s tone, Sherlock is aware that he doesn’t really hate his brother, and he knows Mycroft is right. Sherlock tolerates it and replies with the one thing his mind can’t let go.

“And John?”

“Doctor Watson and I have agreed that he will stay with Mary. There is the child to consider, and our investigations. He will do his best to make her believe that she truly is safe,” Mycroft tells him. Sherlock can feel his misgivings, and shares them. “It will not be easy for him,” he adds quietly.

“And Bucharest?”

“Yes, I think you’ll find what you’re looking for there.” Mycroft looks smug for a moment, and then doesn’t. “Don’t be reckless, Sherlock.”

**+++**

Two days later, Sherlock stands on the tarmac of a private airfield.

John hangs back, letting Mary hug and kiss him, but coming no closer himself. He reads pain (and anger?) in John’s tight smile and a more complicated riot of emotion that neither of them is willing to read with any clarity in the way John won’t look at him. There’s nothing to do but say goodbye and there are no words that can properly communicate the way leaving John (again) makes Sherlock feel like he’s being cut loose from all that moors him.

But, there’s nothing for it but to get on with what must be.

Sherlock tells John jokes and fairy tales, pleased when the tightness in his face breaks. He locks John’s laugh—the sound of it—away in his mind where he’ll always have it. He considers telling John more than just his name. He considers telling John the only thing there is left to tell him. He considers leaving John with the actual words.

He doesn’t.

Instead, Sherlock invokes the unspoken, and lets it hang in the air between them. He  knows that the words will only make the loss and uncertainty of this parting too raw and too immediate. Even so, it’s soothing to acknowledge them in their absence—to make their absence manifest and let it breathe. He wonders if John can hear them. Sherlock presses his lips together and watches John look everywhere but at him, while he can’t look away. He knows his face is betraying him, and there’s nothing he can do to keep what he feels from welling up in his eyes and writing itself on his skin, and Sherlock feels like his heart is an acrobat. Like it's twisting itself into contorted, impossible shapes, stretching and twisting him to the limit of his endurance. He knows John has things locked inside and twisting, too. Their mutual silence steadies them both, and the ballast of what they won’t say binds them to an equilibrium of weighted stasis. The fear that their balance comes at a cost they can no longer afford—the fear that this really is goodbye, threatens to overwhelm him.

But if he loves John, he must do this. This is the only thing he can do.

When he takes off his glove to reach for his friend’s dear, warm hand, he sees John’s surprise and hesitation, and knows it for what it is. He watches as John straightens himself, dutiful and military, and finally proffers his. Sherlock holds onto it moments longer than is strictly necessary, memorising the fleshy heat of it, and then, feeling his resolve start to crumble, he turns on his heel towards the plane.

Lets the East Wind take him.

Sherlock doesn’t know whether he really is one of the unworthy, but he does know that the only way to find out is to endure, and do what he must. If these are his final days, he’ll live them fiercely. He’ll live for John, and for Baker Street. He’ll be as brilliant and ruthless as he can be in exchange for the hope of future cups of tea shared in companionable silence on rainy London mornings. He’ll fight for that life with every bit of intelligence and resilience he possesses, and if he dies, he’ll die knowing it was for the only thing that really mattered.

One way or the other, the suffering will be finite.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [And I Can Love](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6599479) by [MissDavis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissDavis/pseuds/MissDavis)




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